A recent study features information on pornography that the average collegiate is unlikely to ever encounter on campus.

For example, men are six times more likely to view pornography than women, but recent reports suggest that this gap is closing, the Family Research Council and The Center for the Advancement of Catholic Higher Education found. Seventeen percent of women struggle with it as an addiction and 1 in 3 visitors to porn sites are women.

Dr. Patrick Fagan of the FRC[1] pointed out that the average age at which the young discover pornography is decreasing from the early teens.

These findings have more than academic implications. Pornography’s effect on marriage is substantial, Dr. Fagan pointed out in a lecture at the FRC last week. Two-thirds of couples that have a pornography problem are not sexually intimate and 68% of divorces involved pornography and people who consume porn are 3.7 times more likely to be involved with prostitution.

Conversely, Dr. Fagan pointed out, the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey discovered that married couples enjoyed sex more and that “those who worship God weekly have the best sex.” He said that this has not been publicized and that someday he’d “like to see this on the cover of Playboy Magazine sometime” to push the importance of religion and family and “truthful advertising.” He may have to wait awhile for that.

He asked the audience, after going over these findings, “how many of our college kids understand that” married, religious couples have more enjoyable sex and more stable relationships. “The truth has not been given to them,” concluded Dr. Fagan. He also noted that 80% of women that only had one sexual partner (their husband) are in a stable marriage, which drops to 54% when the woman has had at least one sexual partner other than their husband before marriage.

With young girls, he found that the later the first sexual experience is in their life, the fewer sexual partners she will have. With teenagers, friends do matter. A teen has a 96% chance of losing her virginity if her friends are sexually active and do not worship compared to 3% for those who worship consistently and have friends that aren’t sexually active.

Spencer Irvine is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.
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